<WARNING – FOUL TEMPERED RANTINGS – AURIA LOVERS PROBABLY OUGHT TO BACK OUT NOW>
<HONESTLY, I REALLY GO ON IN THIS ONE>
<OK THEN, DON’T SAY I DIDN”T WARN YOU>
Auria Appregret special report
I have been on a bit of an app binge the last few weeks. The reason is simple, I got a bonus and once my debts and the tax man had eaten most of it I had enough left for some pocket money. This is a bit of a novelty for me as I usually give myself a $10 a month allowance for apps, or thereabouts, which I agonize over spending. I also upgraded my beloved ipad2 to an ipad4 because I have noticed the extra load since audiobus came out and I started using loopy for more than 6 tracks..
Something I had promised myself for a while was Auria, mostly because it’s billed as a “Proper” DAW and I want to improve the mastering on my tracks. I knew it would creak on an ipad2 but promised myself I would buy it once I had an ipad4.
Well, “the pricier the App the bigger the AppRegret” they say.
Actually nobody says that but if I have my way they will one day.
It seems to me that one of the big problems with Auria, or it’s perception in the iOS music community, is that it is taken seriously by non-iOS musicians, and that gives it a load more respect than it deserves. Auria looks like a traditional DAW, so people who are familiar with that interface are impressed with it. Certainly it is billed as a “Proper” DAW for iOS, articles talk of iOS music coming of age etc. Sadly Auria is not a “Proper” DAW for iOS, it is a desktop DAW inexpertly shoehorned onto iOS, and it really shows.
Non iOS musicians have a tendency to look down on iOS musicians, the web is full of articles about iOS music apps being “toys”, and there is an overall snobbery that iOS music isn’t “serious”.
This is, of course, complete crap. Those of us old and warty enough to remember the 80′s and 90′s will remember many similar arguments. Electronic music isn’t ‘proper’ music, you can’t put an album together inside a computer, digital can never capture music the way analog can, software synths are not proper synths, hardware is always superior, analog is better, big desktop computers are OK for music but you can’t make an album on a laptop, and on and on and on. Every generation of innovators becomes the next generation of nay sayers.
The side effect of this snobbery however is that when an application like Auria comes along, that attracts the approval of non-iOS musicians, it gets taken very seriously indeed.
The sound data you are working with on an iPad is digital. No app is going to record your data any better than any other app. This is the beauty of digital sound recording. If I ACP/Audiobus a sound from a synth it will be identical in ANY piece of software I put it in. My 8 bar loop from Addictive Synth will be the same whether I paste it into Loopy, or Nanostudio, or BM2.
So what is it that an iDAW brings to the table? Two things, workflow and post processing. Workflow is how you get the sound into the app, how you can move it about, trim it, cut it, arrange it, duplicate and delete it. Post Processing is the adaptation of that sound: mix, master, compression, EQ levels, FX etc
While Auria allows you to record in directly with Audiobus (resource permitting) and you can record multiple tracks simultaneously from external sources, it fails where workflow is concerned. I have not heard anyone say anyone positive about workflow in Auria, the best I have heard from anyone is that ‘it is a pain but you get used to it’, most people seem to feel that it is awkward and laborious. Personally I think it is dreadful, everything in Auria works like a desktop application, the endless highlight>click menu>select process makes it miserable to work with on an ipad. Seriously, if you work in loops and you need to highlight>edit menu>duplicate just to copy/paste that loop ONCE there is a lot of tapping. At least on a desktop you would have a right click option, but on iOS its all menu/select. Bad bad bad.
So that leaves the post processing, and to be fair this is where most people agree that this is where Auria shines. I don’t. It may be that my club-destroyed ears are incapable of hearing the subtleties but I was very unimpressed with the basic out-of-the-box offerings. The Reverb is good, I can’t deny that, and it should be given that applying reverb to a couple of tracks appears to eat up the whole memory of the ipad. Chorus and delay were poor, to my ears both sounded awful. I was ambivalent to the compression, in fact i either didn’t notice it at all or it stepped on the sound so hard it made it sound lousy. The EQ was difficult to understand (thanks to the “this is how it looks in a proper studio, tweak my Hz!” interface) and I wasn’t at all impressed with the results. I am told that for a mere extra $30 there is an excellent EQ plugin that actually uses a visual/touch interface that you would expect from an iOS application in the first place, and also sounds great. This leads me to believe that the crappy interface and unimpressive results of the built in post processing is deliberate. It would be impossible to market a DAW without these built in FX, however as a business model there is no incentive to make them anything other than adequate, otherwise why would people buy the plugins? This is surely the weakness of the IAP model, dissatisfaction with the product is built in.
Auria struggles for resource on even the most up to date iPad. In my first foray with Auria I started getting “Freeze tracks” messages coming up only half a dozen tracks in. I was shocked, I had 6 parts pasted in (each only 8 bars long), and had only some EQ/Chorus/Reverb set on those, and Auria was running out of memory. An ipad, for all it can do, does not have extra RAM slots and is not expandable, if you are building an ipad application is would seem to make sense to build that application with some reference to the available resources on the hardware, once again this feels like a port from a desktop application. Even the Auria documentation when discussing track freezing mentions resource constraints on desktop, laptop and tablet…
After using Auria for a couple of tracks I am back using Nanostudio for the bulk of my work. Always unsure of my assessment, and aware of my grumpiness around apps I don’t get on with, I asked around to see if anyone else had had the same sort of experience with Auria. My sample size is not huge, probably too small to be significant really, but I did find a few people who are happy with it. It does sound like investing the extra money in the plugins improve the user experience considerably. I also heard from a number of people who, like me, have used it a couple of times and have uninstalled it or never used it again.
I would like to believe that a superior sound can be achieved using Auria, after all it cost me more than Nanostudio and BM2 together, however I am not prepared to throw good money after bad to find out. More importantly though I cannot work with that UI, when I am making music I work fast, very fast. If I am ‘in the zone’ I can get a whole track together and completed in a couple of hours, and for that to be possible I need a UI that doesn’t get in my way, and for that reason alone I am unlikely to be using Auria much in the future.
Nice write-up.
We are in amazingly similar circumstances. I also just bought Auria and a bunch of other apps because I got my annual bonus and had a few extra bucks to spend. And I also just upgraded my iPad to to an iPad 4 about a month ago for Audiobus performance reasons.
As you may have noticed, I am also very prolific when I get going, and I avoid things getting in the way and slowing down my creative process. One of the most critical aspects of my creative workflow is that I don’t have to think about it; everything needs to be right where I need it, fully working and easy. If the process gets cumbersome, difficult or fun-deprived, I will simply lose interest and go read a comic or play a video game. So I respect where you’re coming from on this.
Honestly, I love MultiTrack DAW. I didn’t like it at first, but when HarmonicDog added Audiobus support, and not just that, but brilliantly-executed Audiobus support, I fell in love with it and have used it almost exclusively since. The only two things missing from MultiTrack for my needs have been good reverb and additional fade curves (MultiTrack offers 1 choice… 1).
About 5 minutes into Auria, I was fairly certain it wasn’t going to replace MultiTrack DAW in the recording part of my process, Audiobus-enabled or not. There’s honestly just too much crap in the way. Having finished my first track in Auria, however, I do see a place for it for me in the mixdown stage, because that’s where I need the reverb and fade options. Due to the nature of my primary apps and overall workflow, I generally end up with 3-5 stereo tracks at most, so copy and pasting them from MDAW (through AudioShare) to Auria, while tedious, is not overly painful.
I actually dropped another $70 on plug-ins and IR packs when I first opened Auria because I had read through SmiteMatter’s reviews and pretty much expected the built in options to be limited. And since I was mostly buying Auria for the reverb, I figured I might as well get the best reverb options it had to offer. So far I have not been disappointed with the IR packs for the convolution reverb or the plug-ins I bought, PSP Echo and PianoVerb2. Despite having spent entirely too much money on a single app, I can’t say I regret it yet because I do really like the reverb… and I have several fade curves to choose from.
So, I think my perspective, the type of music I make, and my expectations going into it may make Auria a worthwhile investment for me… time will tell. If, however, I had bought Auria with hopes of throwing away all my other DAWS and working start-to-finish in Auria, I am quite certain I would have been disappointed.
I think WaveMachine Labs should release a pure “plug-in host only” app in the free to $10 range that would allow you to use your Auria IAP plug-ins in the Audiobus FX slot without the need for purchasing the whole $50 monster package. I think something like that would be a much better value for most iOS musicians, would pave the way for a lot more audio plug-in development for iOS, and reduce some of the “TableTop ready”-type closed-system stigma that Auria currently exhibits with its IAPs.
I agree with you 100%. I wrote a brief statement of woe on Tim Webb’s site yesterday. Nobody chimed in one way or another. I’m having all the problems you’ve described, and it’s been a real frustration, to say the least.
You seem quite a bit more experienced than I am, so it’s gratifying to hear that you get Freeze messages after making only 5 or so tracks, etc., because for a while I was blaming myself for that and other problems that such a supposedly great app wouldn’t have.
Thanks for your rave!
Nice write ups from pants and clif.
I agree that MultiTrack DAW is great. Lightweight on the CPU (I’m on an iPad 3) and rock solid.
Simon
Thanks @iClifDotMe for that, it was a really thoughtful and balanced response to my rantings…. And as such has no place on this webpage!! Balance? Thought? Pah!!
Thanks fella!
My pleasure
Thanks! Looking at the graphics and listening to what you say about the interface has cleared a lot of questions for me.
You’ve just saved me a small fortune. Been looking at this for a while and resisting temptation… now my appLust has gone
Excellent info. Next question: Cubasis, yea or nay?
That was a well written article, but I have to respectfully disagree with a few points. I have found auria to be fantastic for my needs, and am working on a 16gb ipad2.
Almost every track on our website was mixed in auria, and previously these tracks had been kicking around for a while, never getting 100% finsihed for one reason or another. I should clarify that I am not using auria for recording or content creation, which is bound to affect our impressions, only for mixing. I did redo one bass track though, and it was a painless process. I find the lack of options in the plugins to be a help in getting work done, and I like the channel EQ, both in sound and in operation. And for riding levels, touching the faders is so much easier than using a mouse. When there was no ability to save snapshots, I really had to commit to a mix because once I changed something I could never get it back exactly the same way.
I’m wondering if the resource problem you mention is the result of adding reverb to each track individually instead of using the aux buses? I do have to freeze tracks, but I mixed a song that had 28 tracks, a few in stereo, and was able to complete it. The necessity to manage resources makes me commit to decisions and get on with mixing, instead of trying out many different plugins that do the same thing.
As for extra purchases, I have the psp echo, the microwarmer, the old timer, and recently the classicverb pro. I think they all sound great, although the echo is a little strange to get used to operating, but that has nothing to do with touchscreen or ipad, it’s just a quirky interface. Sounds good though.
I have also found the developers to be very responsive to bug reports and user ideas.
In any event, I can see why some people would not like using auria, and to be fair, editing audio in it is still a chore. I haven’t really used audiobus with it too much yet, although at some point I will so I may encounter issues there, who knows? I bought auria when they had the half price sale thinking that I wanted in now, and as hardware develops and the program develops, I’m already an owner so I can see the growth. I did the same with reaper on my pc and now mac.
To sum up, I like auria a lot and it has changed the way I work for the better, but certainly there is no program that works for everyone.
Ditto on Jesse’s post, I’m interested in knowing whether Cubasis is good in the workflow sense. It certainly looks pretty good in the demo videos I’ve seen.
I’m still nursing my AppWounds after dropping $50 on Auria, and I haven’t forgotten the BM2 fiasco yet either, so it might be a while before I start flirting with the idea of buying Cubasis! I have resumed my love affair with Nanostudio in the meantime…
an excellent set of thoughts. does anyone else find it unbelievably frustrating that none of the DAW offerings do everything? NanoStudio has a brilliant synth, some great effects, but no audio tracks, no audiobus. Auria has no MIDI or virtual instruments. Multitrack DAW is slick as hell, low on CPU use, but doesn’t have enough processing options, MIDI or VIs. Beatmaker is incredibly feature rich but the instruments are limited and the workflow not great. Cubase has the best UI, the best audiobus and virtual midi implementation and is probably easiest to use but the effects and instruments aren’t great. Garageband has great sounding instruments, but is severely restircted in other ways. Meteor sort of has everything but is so frustrating to use it’s barely worth the effort.
would apple just release logic for ipad, already?
fwiw, i tend to use cubasis most.
Greetings…
Your article hit on several key points that I happen to agree with and I am not a superstar nor an expert in …anything! Just like many, I am strung out on audio APPS! Especially synth apps, quirky noise apps, beat makers , recording, loopers, audiobus and now looking at DAW apps. My ultimate reasoning for not purchasing one YET although trust me I was beyond tempted with the usual suspects IS that in the end I still I guess am old fashioned (well I don’t break out the tascam porta 001 – not that old fashioned!) because I like to move audio bits around on my computer still and like the options and plug ins that I use in DSP-QUATTRO, Logic, even Reaper is working nicely. I know : bad and unpopular answer that many have just halted reading but I have been on your site 5 minutes and already can really gel with lots that I see:
APP REGRET! Awesome! Know EXACTLY the feeling. Bought a few that were “above low priced” shall we say and can’t get them to bloody work! I use a new(ish) ipad mini and wonder also if it is me? Why the hell doesn’t this app do quite perfectly what it says and a few others are saying it should do?? Is the ipad mini a lesser powered tablet(even though apple’s own ads state ‘every part an ipad..’ or something…
So why does BeatTwirl totally crash when I try and set the number of bars… And they don’t reply…so WTF it’s like buying a virtual doorstop! Looking back on their “latests” NOW I see that they haven’t even been active for a couple years (with BeatTwirl) and I should have checked this before just BUYING! But it’s like VOODOO or something because once you here about an app that is “supposedly” great it eventually gets you to BUY it! So BeatTwirl did it to me because I am totally into an iOS app that does the whole Propheads Recycle visual beat/loop rearrange and time/tempo manipulation thing. So far I have auditioned many!! This one LOOKED the best so I was HOOKED. So that, to me IS THE THING and I will wrap all this up with my point ->LOOKS. remember the phrase, “all show and no go!”? I am seeing a lot of that again. Yes a great looking synth/looper/DAW is visually stunning especially with ‘retina’ and whatever
H O W E V E R— I am a synthesist, a dj, a somewhat seasoned computer sound + digital recording person who DOES NOT WANT TO BE YOUR TEST SUBJECT!
I buy the apps on the newest device thinking they are gonna work! When they don’t I start to re-experience a déjà vu from when I went Mac…when they just released the G4-400 because I was tired of troubleshooting my PC for 10 years to get it to do midi and audio simultaneously! Ring a bell anyone? So I will say this again: we are AUDIO guys so the functionality of the AUDIO is TOP priority, NOT the colorful 3d interface! Not the shadowed bevel on the carefully detailed KNOB! Don’t get it twisted, I can totally appreciate all those things but foremost lets get the audio side running like a fricken machine and then focus on the visual enhancements, right?
Yeah so I use Meteor as my DAW of choice. Why do I feel like I need to keep that a secret? I cant understand it TBH – it has got it all – but for some inexplicable reason it seems to have acquired the status of a leper – that people would rather not mention it in conversation at all possible. Someone recommended Cubasis to me recently but without automation it just looks pretty to me which doesn’t cut it. Don’t even mention Auria. Meteor may look like a bad hair day but it CAN DO STUFF! The reverb is crap though. Oh and midi too apparently. But apart from the stuff its not very good at – it does everything:) I refuse to buy another so called DAW until I have firm evidence that it can do everything better than Meteor (well at least until payday).
To quote the author:
“Non iOS musicians have a tendency to look down on iOS musicians, the web is full of articles about iOS music apps being “toys”, and there is an overall snobbery that iOS music isn’t “serious”.
This article of yours has been featured on numerous app blogs.
Highly likely “non iOS” people see these whinings or open admissions
that certain apps are toylike ( especially if they don’t have acp or audiobus).
So naturally they would conclude by reading that a “pro daw” such as
Auria is also a toy when known iOS artists are slamming popular apps!
Your in the public eye complaining about “app regret” quite frequently, what do
you expect?
You are giving the “non iOS” peeps the evidence they will use against you sir:(
Dear Bananainvagina
Hmmm. I gave this comment a bit of thought, I found it wedged in between 91 spam comments so sorry for the delay in approving it.
No, I don’t think so. I am deeply critical of apps I consider to be crappy, it is true, but I am also as unambiguously enthusiastic about apps I consider to be good. See my reviews of Impaktor or Audulus, or anything I have said about Magellan, WaveMapper, ThumbJam, iPolysix, Addictive, Nlog, Animoog, Nanostudio etc.
For iOS music and music apps to be taken seriously there is a degree of quality control required, and as the consumers it is up to us to provide that quality control. If I buy shoes, or a car, or a computer, or any other product that I believe to be substandard then I am quite within my rights as a consumer to say so. If we were all to keep quiet about substandard apps would that result in an improvement in the perception of iOS as a music production platform? No, it would mean that iOS will be known as a platform full of musical toys. If someone looking into iOS for music production reads the blogs and reviews that actually report back the positive and negative then at least they might buy the apps that will prove useful to them.
That non iOS musicians might read my reviews and decide that ALL iOS apps are toys as a result might possibly be a consequence, but I doubt it, and if they did that would be a classic example of Confirmation Bias rather than an informed conclusion. Also, and this is the probably the key point, almost nobody reads my blog and those that do are probably already iOS musicians.
and anyway – Auria really deserved to be taken to task, and judging from the response I have had an awful lot of people agree.
Great write up !!!! One look at the drop down menu and I said No Thank You !!
Now do PPG Wave* apps!!!
Awesome synth… Horrible UI … Meh keyboard
C’mon !!!
Interesting points about Auria. I’m an Auria user and I can identify with some of the quirks you talk about, like the dropdown menus and utilization of the touch interface.
But I see this app as the bridge for desktop-based users to interact with the mobile platform. They see the menus and the “familiar look” and be less intimidated by the prospect of using a “toy” to arrange/produce tracks. On the other hand, the ones that have completely adopted the mobile music experience (last time I did a track on my desktop was almost a year ago) are paying the headaches in functionality for the sake of bringing the desktop people in.
I decided to use Auria, growing pains and all, as my nerve center for my tracks made in all the apps I have and I have not looked back since. I hate it when the app crashes in the middle of me tweaking automation and such, but I also remember my old desktop DAW crashing while in the middle of work, so it is part of the growing process.
All in all, an interesting read of that is wrong and should be fixed in Auria. Now for the good in Auria you can take a read at SmiteMatter’s page on:
http://smitematter.com/2012/09/01/auria-app-review/
I offers a counterpoint of what your have experienced with the app and balances things out a little. I commend you for being up front about what you hate about it and giving us the warning before reading
Cheers!